It is now a good ten years since a most efficient passenger-locomotive was finished in this country—to turn out one cylinder-horse-power per hour from 16.5 pounds of water and 2.12 pounds of coal and weighing but 121 pounds per cylinder-horse-power. A few years later an equally efficient freight-puller was made, creating one cylinder-horse-power per hour from 15.4 pounds of water and 2.00 pounds of coal and yet weighing but 88.9 pounds per cylinder-horse-power. This was several years ago, please remember. Since then many, many locomotives have been built that were not nearly so good. Some of these have been retired to light service already. Why?
Why are not these engines of 1910 not only being equaled but bettered by the engines of 1922? Why does it ever become necessary to scrap locomotives, within half a century of their construction at any rate? There is not one of their bearing parts that is not capable of infinite replacements, after which, it is a question of mere lubrication.
I saw not many months ago under the train-shed of the passenger-station at Tours, France, a copper-boilered locomotive of the Paris-Orleans railway which bore the date of her construction, 1857, proudly upon her neat sides. She still was an efficient little locomotive, handling a small job fit for her small size and handling it very well indeed. The oldest locomotive that I personally have known to be in constant service in the United States was an engine belonging to a paper company near Potsdam, New York, which had been built by the Taunton Locomotive Works for the Union Pacific railroad in 1860, and sold to the Central Vermont in the following year. Rebuilt several times, it still was in service in 1919. This engine is very much of an exception. A twenty-year-old engine in this country to-day is a veteran. The famous “999” of the New York Central, which in 1893 was exhibited at the Chicago Fair as the fastest locomotive in the world, in 1903 was handling a “plug” milk-train up in northern New York. It now has been retired as a sort of museum-piece.
Why are our steam locomotives scrapped in this way? Why are they not built universally for their highest possibilities of development? Why are they not given the mechanical refinements that experience has shown well worth while?
Once again: tradition and cost.
The first of these some day is to be eliminated. And as for the second; listen to my friend, the dear old practical railroader out there in the West. I much doubt if he will ever be able to finish reading the preceding paragraphs. But should he succeed in completing them, I anticipate receiving a telegram—a letter never would be prompt or emphatic enough—which will read something after this fashion:
“Now, what are you doing again? Don’t you know that to put in all these darn phool [softened to calm the feelings of the telegraph operators] contraptions in our railroading would cost a national debt or two—of the old days? How can the railroads, strapped, without money to-day, go into these things?”
I shall not respond by telegraph. I have no Western Union frank. But I shall sit down and write my good old tempestuous friend that in my own humble and uneconomic opinion the best way to economize is to introduce methods that lead toward economy. When the Lackawanna system spent about $14,000,000 a few years ago in rebuilding and perfecting about forty miles of its main line between Scranton and Binghamton, it was said by some clever people that only a road as extremely wealthy as it was could go into such frills. Well, last year the operating economies effected to that company by this improvement, and by this improvement alone, came to about 12 per cent. of the expenditure, while the money itself, was obtained at 4 per cent. I should like to ask Mr. Underwood, of the always almost-bankrupt Erie, if that carefully managed property would not have been in receivership and helpless a full decade ago, if it had not been for his great grade revisions on his main line east of Youngstown, Ohio? And Mr. Daniel Willard, of the Baltimore and Ohio if it is not true that the superheaters on but 1000 of that railroad’s 1600 locomotives are not already saving it more than 750,000 tons of coal a year?
To save money upon our American railroads it frequently becomes necessary to spend it, and to spend it generously, but always wisely of course.
We measure expenditures properly by the results. An improvement to a locomotive costing as much as $10,000 to buy and even as much as that to maintain each year is a good investment, is it not, if it saves $50,000 a year? The superheater, the arch, the booster, and the feed-water heater together vastly increase the power of the steam locomotive. To gain their equivalent in the locomotive itself, the average Mikado-type freight-puller of eight big drivers and with extra length boiler-tubes—nineteen or twenty feet—would have to have not less than fourteen driving-wheels and boiler-tubes of the almost incredible and impracticable length of thirty-six feet. Is that graphic enough for the layman to understand? Can you understand this about the booster alone? Take a reasonable stretch of level railroad division, say 125 to 175 miles. It is good low-grade line and an engine of even moderate capacity ought to handle a 3000-ton freight-train over it easily, if it were not for that nasty little hill half-way down the line. A chain is no better than its weakest link. A railroad division is no easier than its stiffest hill. This particular one means that the maximum train-load on that division may never exceed 2700 tons.